Bollywood Boy

Hardy's tale of fame and fortune in India's Bollywood sheds light on the subcontinent's obsessive adulation of its own tinsel town. Each year India makes twice the number of pictures produced in Hollywood to feed a billion-strong domestic audience united in their hunger for""maximum escapism and minimum reality."" The fantastic productions follow a rigid, strictly censored story line that substitutes Hollywood-style sex and violence with elaborate song and dance numbers. Using the""newest, biggest and brightest star in the Bollywood firmament,"" Hrithik Roshan, as a model, Hardy gives the reader a personal, discursive tour of this over-the-top world of Indian film culture, from the swanky Bombay club scene to the street side chai-stalls. She introduces a gallery of Indian pop culture characters, including veteran dancer Pinky Ali, ""queen of the wet-sari routines,"" and the ""testosterone triumvirate,"" Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan, ""the three good Muslim boys who hold the Hindi film industry in thrall."" She also reveals the Bollywood-Indian mafia connection, where stars sign away future profits in exchange for lavish premier parties or production investments (Hrithik's father was shot for refusing to pay off Bollywood's""Big Brother""). Although Hardy's narrative is sometimes as dizzyingly detailed as a Bollywood dance sequence, both Indian film enthusiasts and neophytes will laugh at this look at Hollywood's whirling parallel universe.